The Bone Collector

course my payback was spending six months printing floaters. But we nailed the perp with some trace and a print off one of those Polaroids—happened to be the same snap the Post used on page one, as a matter of fact. Just like what you did yesterdaymorning, Sachs. Closing off the tracks and Eleventh Avenue.”
    “I didn’t think about it,” she said. “I just did it. Why’re you looking at me that way?”
    “Come on, Sachs. You know where you ought to be. On the street. Patrol, Major Crimes, IRD, doesn’t matter . . . But Public Affairs? You’ll rot there. It’s a good job for some people but not you. Don’t give up so fast.”
    “Oh, and you’re not giving up? What about Berger?”
    “Things’re a little different with me.”
    Her glance questioned, They are? And she went prowling for a Kleenex. When she returned to the chair she asked, “You don’t carry any corpses around with you?”
    “I have in my day. They’re all buried now.”
    “Tell me.”
    “Really, there’s nothing—”
    “Not true. I can tell. Come on—I showed you mine.”
    He felt an odd chill. He knew it wasn’t dysreflexia. His smile faded.
    “Rhyme, go on,” she persisted. “I’d like to hear.”
    “Well, there was a case a few years ago,” he said, “I made a mistake. A bad mistake.”
    “Tell me.” She poured them each another finger of the Scotch.
    “It was a domestic murder-suicide call. Husband and wife in a Chinatown apartment. He shot her, killed himself. I didn’t have much time for the scene; I worked it fast. And I committed a classic error—I’d made up my mind about what I was going to find before I started looking. I found some fibers that I couldn’t place but I assumed that the husband and wife’d tracked them in. I found the bullet fragments but didn’t check them against the gun we found at the scene. I noticed the blowback pattern but didn’t grid it to double-check the exact position of the gun. I did the search, signed off and went back to the office.”
    “What happened?”
    “The scene had been staged. It was really a burglary-murder. And the perp had never left the apartment.”
    “What? He was still there?”
    “After I left he crawled out from under the bed and started shooting. He killed one forensic tech and wounded an assistant ME. He got out on the street and there was a shootout with a couple of portables who’d heard the 10–13. The perp was shot up—he died later—but he killed one of the cops and wounded the other. He also shot up a family that’d just come out of a Chinese restaurant across the street. Used one of the kids as a shield.”
    “Oh, my God.”
    “Colin Stanton was the father’s name. He wasn’t hurt at all and he’d been an army medic—EMS said he probably could’ve saved his wife or one or both of the kids if he’d tried to stop the bleeding but he panicked and froze. He just stood there, watching them all die in front of him.”
    “Jesus, Rhyme. But it wasn’t your fault. You—”
    “Let me finish. That wasn’t the end of it.”
    “No?”
    “The husband went back home—upstate New York. Had a breakdown and went into a mental hospital for a while. He tried to kill himself. They put him under a suicide watch. First he tried to cut his wrist with a piece of paper—a magazine cover. Then he sneaked into the library and found a water glass in the librarian’s bathroom, shattered it and slashed his wrists. They stitched him up okay and kept him in the mental hospital for another year or so. Finally they released him. A month or so after he was out he tried again. Used a knife.” Rhyme added coolly, “That time it worked.”
    He’d learned about Stanton’s death in an obituary faxed from the Albany County coroner to NYPD Public Affairs. Someone there had sent it to Rhyme via interoffice mail with a Post-It attached: FYI—thought you’d be interested, the officer had written.
    “There was an IA investigation. Professional incompetence. They slapped my wrist. I think they should’ve fired me.”
    She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. “And you’re telling me you don’t feel guilty about that?”
    “Not anymore.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    “I served my time, Sachs. I lived with those bodies for a while. But I gave ’em up. If I hadn’t, how could I have kept on working?”
    After a long moment she said, “When I was eighteen I got a ticket. Speeding. I was doing ninety in a forty zone.”
    “Well.”
    “Dad